Popular music streaming app Spotify officially launched in New Zealand today. The free Spotify app is available now in the App Store for iPhone/iPad and for Mac at spotify.com
Signing up is simple and only took two taps to login via Facebook and start a 48 free-trial of Spotify Premium on my iPhone. Once the trial ends the service reverts to Spotify Free which gives ad-supported streaming access to a catalogue of some 16 million songs. Unfortunetly Spotify Free only gives access via a Mac or PC and streaming to an iPhone or iPad requires a $12.99 monthly subscription to Spotify Premium.
A quick flick through the catalogue had all the tracks I wanted available to play instantly and audio-quality was great via wi-fi. Using the in-app Settings I bumped the stream quality to High (160kbit/s) and turned on a 5 second crossfade to avoid the iTunes match style buffering gap between songs. The app uses 20-50MB of data per hour of streaming music so make sure you’ve got a good data plan or connected to wi-fi before hitting play.
Been waiting for so long
(pacharawit has made 57 comments)
I have a UK address and bank etc so I have been lucky enough to have a spotify premium account for the last year. I have to say 1 year in and it still amazes me. I often find myself saying its just to good to be true. Fantastic service. I haven’t used iTunes for music since. The NZ price is slightly cheaper than the UK price so I’ll be switching over my account later. The only thing that was missing from spotify for a long time was an official iPad app but just a few weeks ago they released a superb iPad app. Enjoy Spotify people! And here’s a playlist to get you all started
http://open.spotify.com/user/stevenixon/playlist/0Tq2gpFMJA74nf4X80BiJo
(Paul has made 337 comments)
Yaaahoooo. Thanks for the info about data rates too Mike.
(MattyG has made 24 comments)
Clearly everyone has been assimilated, otherwise we’d see every report mentioning that the Facebook login is a *requirement*.
That’s me out. I guess they don’t want my money.
(zkarj has made 48 comments)
I managed to sign up without FB. I ended up connecting to FB later on but I did note that in the Preferences there is a disconnect from Facebook option.
Maybe try signing up through the website like I did, instead of through the application. In anycase, you can always make a faux FB login and then choose the disconnect option in preferences.
Assimilated? Yeah, I think most have…and I know what you mean…
It’s funny how the status quo went from, “never ever post your real identity online!” to “you must post your real identity online!”… Quite a shift!
zkarj wrote:
(jaeming has made 2 comments)
Yes, yes, so people keep telling me they signed up without Facebook. I’m referring to the NZ launch. As in, it has only just launched, so those who signed up without Facebook and “a while ago” did so against the terms and conditions of the foreign-based services.
The masses – including me – must have a Facebook account to sign up. Yeah, I could set one up that I don’t use but that’s just another online account I don’t need and that I am opposed in principle to being associated with. I very publicly quite Facebook last year and I’ve not seen any evidence that the reasons I quit have changed for the better.
Sorry to sound narky, but unless anyone can offer me a tested method to sign up to the NZ service today without Facebook, then it’s really not helpful.
(zkarj has made 48 comments)
@ zkarj:
It looks like you’re right. I didn’t realise they now required a FB account to sign up. I did sign up sometime last year when I was overseas and they didn’t require it for me then. I never used spotify in New Zealand until it just officially launched though.
At least they allow disconnecting FB in the app preferences but it’s ridiculous that people are having to create dummy accounts on FB as a workaround to just sign up to Spotify. I hear what you’re saying about the principle of the thing. Apparently they have some sort of partnership with FB now.
Well, there’s always Grooveshark (if they don’t get sued into oblivion this year).
(jaeming has made 2 comments)